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Basic Gold Making Guide.

Submitted by Harper1990 on Tue, 2009-08-04 23:49

Gold, Glorious Gold!

OK, so thanks for looking at my guide! I'm fed up of looking on this site and seeing, 'make 300G per hour! Be a rogue and stealth to bosses! For loot which *may not drop*. You only need to be level 80 and have 50,000hp!'. I admit it, I exaggerated, but you know what I mean.

Alright, so let's get the show on the road!

Level 1.

Stop! Don't log in. Instead, create another character. This will be a Bank Alt., or a 'mule'. This guy will store your gold to stop you spending it, and sell everything on the AH for you. Everything.

OK, so first - add-ons. You *need*, pretty much, Auctioneer. It's a great add on - the first time you use it, you click 'scan' which will come up at the bottom of the AH pane. (On your mule, remember. The first thing you do.)

You then, when you auction something, click the 'post' tab, not the usual 'auction' tab. Drag and drop and *boom*, that's pretty much sold for you.

** Mail - Pre 40, same as above. After 40, Agility, Intellect and Stamina for Hunters/DPS shamans, and Intellect, some spirit maybe (and later things like Spell power, and spell crit.)

**Leather - most things will sell. Be careful of bad mixes though - Agility and Spirit, for example.

**Cloth - Whatever. Really, there is little that won't sell, and what doesn't may well depend on your server.

[i]Reagents for professions is the final thing I can think of. So remember all those Small Eggs you vendored for 10 silver? Yeah they might be going for a gold a stack of 20. And remember all those chunks of boar meat? Well, on my server, that's 3G for 10 right there.

So that should be the AH covered right there. At level one (or RIGHT NOW if you haven't done so already - like a fool!) take a mule into a city, and scan the AH. First part, finished!

Level 5

Well done, you made level 5 and you'll soon be in your main town. Don't stop there, go to the city first. Pick up Mining and buy a Pick, and pick up Skinning and buy a knife. You'll find a vendor along with your trainer for these, or any Trade Goods Merchant will do.

This bit is really simple, but really important. I'm going to make it nice and big, because if you don't do this, you don't make as much gold. By a long way. (Pardon the patronising undertone, but some people may well ignore this.)
SKIN EVERYTHING, AND MINE EVERYTHING. SEND IT TO YOUR MULE, POST AND PROFIT.

You really have no idea how much money this will make, or at least I assume you don't. On most servers, Copper Ore sells for about 1G for 20, with things like Thorium often hitting as much as 20G. You'll be mining a *lot* of this, and it all stacks up. The same goes for skinning, and the later-leathers in the game. Even the earliest leathers aren't to be snuffed, mind.

While Questing

While questing, these rules apply;

1) Take the quest reward with the highest sell-to-vendor price.

You'd be suprised how much difference this will make in the long run. If you aren't using anything, your Auctioneer addon will tell you the difference in vendor prices.

Alright, so let's go over the best ways of making gold. I'll cover, in turn, the Auction House, and Dailies .

The Auction House

OK, so by level 80 you're familiar with the place. Hell, maybe you're sick of the sight of it, and sick of waiting for that damn AH scan to complete! But this is where the real money is made - with risk. Playing the Auction House. (Obviously you can do this from the get go, but I'd advise leveling first - you become familiar with prices on the AH, what sells and what doesn't etc)

In essence, playing the Auction house is just like playing the stock market. You can monopolize, you can buy low sell high, and you can go broke very, very quickly.

So here's how it works.

1)Knowing what sells

Simple, no? But I've wasted a *lot* of gold in my time because I pay 25G to post a rare weapon... and get "Auction Expired:..." You don't want this. Really. At all. So, have a look around. If there are one hundred weapons of your type - don't sell them. Maybe try and find an enchanter to DE for them and sell the results. Only one? Risky, but might sell.(After all - if there's only one, maybe it's not in popular demand?) What you want is about 3-4 of your chosen item on the AH, every day. This means they sell - what idiot puts a weapon on the AH, or some armor, that hasn't sold in one week? Exactly.

This is cool, you probably have only ever used Auctioneer to scan and sell. However, it has another function: to search. Yeah, it searches the AH for deals that are going lower than the listing price, and shows them to you! Awesome, huh? Well, be careful. There aare things that can alter the prices and leave you a few bob short.
*Only one item on the AH. People are used to seeing it at low prices, and still it hasn't sold? So why's it going to sell when you repost it even higher?
*Millions of items! So of course, you're going to get some super low prices. However, here-s what'll happen - You'll buy it, and repost it. Then some economy-ruiner will come along, and post his same item, lower than yours. So yours doesn't sell. Don't be bitter, you've been doing it for 80 levels.
*Sometimes, an item will be so rare, that Auctioneer has only seen one. And that was stupidly priced. So 1000g for your rubbish sword doesn't seem quite so bad to the programme!

3)Monopoly time!

OK, so it starts off you pass go, and collect 200 points. You then have to... what? Oh, not that kind of monopoly? Yessir, right away.

OK, so monopolies. These can be tricky to pull off, and require a hefty amount of gold - but if you do pull them off, you're rich. Richer than your wildest dreams! Or, broke. When it doesn't work.

So, the basic idea. Buy everything. Relist it, at your price. You own that market now.

Relax, I said it would be risky! Yeah people will undercut you, but if you monopolize something like Copper ore, for example, or Thorium, of Frostweave cloth - it will always sell. I can personally almost guarantee it!

OK, so that's my limited knowledge of the auction house covered. I won't lie, I don't spend a lot of time in there, but I know a lot about it because I spend a lot of my time in game actually alt-tabbing and reading about WoW. or Facebook... (I play a Paladin, c'mon....).

What do we all love, when we get to 80, hmm?? Yeah, that's right...

Dailies!

I've thought quite a lot about what I could do here. I mean, I could do a guide, with 25 Dailies which takes a little under 2 hours, but that would be quite long. I could give you a link to a dalies guide but hell, they charge. And I'm against that. So what could I do? And then I decided, what the hell. I'll just tell you about the best dailies and a vague idea of which order to do them in, and why! Hope you're happy. If not, you owe me £30.

Now go and do your Argent Tournemant dailies - these are important, if you do nothing else all year round, do these! Just for the rewards you can get, and with the new patch it's even better!

((HINTHINT >> Download Lightheaded. It links comments from WoWhead into your questlog - you'll never get lost on a quest again. << HINTHINT))

Now, this might sound daft. But I did say I was vague! Do your Icecrown dailies! (This is my problem - I haven't quite finished the zone yet so I'm unsure as to where all the dailies are!)

With Lightheaded you'll do them quickly, and over the weeks will plan your own 'speed route'. safe to say, I'd do the Argent Vanguard first, and then do the ones aboard the Skybreaker. Perhaps they stack with others in the zone, I don't know.

Fin.

OK, so I think that's it. I'm sure however there is a lot left to cover, and I'll get some comments telling me thus, so expect to see this guide expanded over the coming days until it really is, the only guide you'll ever need!

Comments

Anyone think it would be a good idea to update this? Been away from the site from a long time now, but now I'm back to WoW it might be worth me having a scan through and updating anything which I can? Let me know :)

"Wise is the man who knows he does not know"...
...Or who knows why my mother keeps calling me.

Anyone think it would be a good idea to update this? Been away from the site from a long time now, but now I'm back to WoW it might be worth me having a scan through and updating anything which I can? Let me know :)

"Wise is the man who knows he does not know"...
...Or who knows why my mother keeps calling me.

Under your heading for "Finished Questing", you may want to let people know that they should continue doing quests in Northrend after they finish their dailies. At max level, you can get between 1k and 2k gold per zone doing the quests.

You may also want to mention the 3 Sholozar Basin dailies, espescially the Oracles. Once you hit revered, you can buy a Cracked Egg which can generate a pet when it hatches.

Scan and use the Neutral AH as well. It's not much, but you can sell the Alliance/Horde vanity pets to the other side, as well as offload other items.

If you level fishing and cooking, you can also get dailies for them. The cooking is especially easy, as you rarely have to leave Dalaran for it. (There is an outland cooking daily, but it requires a lot of travel for each one).

Storm Peaks has a lot more dailies. Beside the Brunhildar and Overstock, there are the Hodir dailies. THere's also a daily at the Dwarven area up inthe mountins, but I forget it's name.

There are faction dailies for the Knights of the Ebon Blade in Icecrowne as well.

I haven't done ay of my dailies in a while, but I seem to recall that doing the Hodir, Argent Tournament, Cooking, Fishing, Brinhildar, Sholazar and Skybreaker dailies pretty much takes up your 25 limit. Icecrown and Hodir dailies are especially good, because they tend to keep you in the same general area and you can get 15 or so done in an hour. Once I get back to doing the dailies, I'll send you some more specific info. Hope this helps.

I do suggest that, as other quality, in-depth guides are posted on this site, provide links to them. For example, Shikamaru is working on an auctioneer guide, and his guides are always very high quality so I'm sure it will be great. Keep you short rundown, but at the end provide a link to his guide for further information. That way, this guide serves as an *awesome* starter for people and an overall summary of the best ways to get gold, but provides links to more in-depth guides if the viewer wants to know more.

My other suggestion is adding a section on farming (what to farm, where to get it, etc) - I know this isn't the best way to make gold but some people just like doing it and it isn't awful if you know what you are doing. Shika has an eternals farming guide that you might want to link to if you decide to write this section.

Check and see if there are any good guides on the site to link to for dailies as well, I seem to recall some but I'm not sure.

These are all just suggestions though, the guide is looking really nice, I'm upping my score to 5/5 Great job!

Well, the guide is still useful as it is. What I would do is leave it up, and make a separate guide with the extra info you want to write, and set it to "in progress" as you work on it. Then, when you are done, just copy and paste out of that guide into this one. Then you can delete the "in progress" guide. I do this when I am working on a major update for one of my guides.

4/5 stars by me. It covers all you should know about making gold while leveling (and here I agree with Jy about guide's name), written clear, simple and thus effective. I would suggest to add herbalism as an option if the player does not like mining, but ok, mining is the best choice to make gold. Another thing, you have not mentioned if is profitable to smelt or don't smelt the ores in order to gain the more money possible.

From my experience I'll add that mining/skinning will make you rich by level 60, not to mention at level 80. I've never really focused on mining while leveling, but I always had more than enough money to afford my mounts, skills and a potion or two when needed. I'd also suggest to scan auction house 1 time a day for 1 week to gather a comprehensive database of your server's economy. But you can sell from day 1 if you wish.

I'd say that this guide makes useless all the other gold guides about leveling, because this one tops the "requirements for a good guide" appreciated on this site: well formatted, clear, easy to read and not redundant. GJ!

This actually sums up getting gold while leveling fairly well, the formatting is good, and the commentary is amusing. I would change the title - getting gold at level cap IS more complicated and playing the auction house or farming specific items IS more effect and deserves it's own guide (and I don't mean things that only some people can do, there are more effective things that ANYONE at level cap can do that are not discussed in this guide). This is my opinion, but I might call this "The Only Making Gold While Leveling Guide You'll Ever Need" (or perhaps something that's less of a mouthful).

Overall pretty good job, the title and the fact that this is made to appear a bit more all-inclusive than it is is my only complaint. I might say that we already have some "make gold while leveling" guides on here, but this one seems to be very straightforward and high enough quality that I think it was worth making.

I'll give you 4/5, it will be 5/5 if you decide to change the title to something more representative of what you've covered.